GA: How did you get into movies as a spectator and when did you decide to become a film-maker?

JJ: Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper - but in Akron, Ohio there wasn't a real variety of films, but when I was a kid, in order to get rid me on Saturday afternoons, my mother would drop me off at a theatre called the State Road theatre that had double and triple features, but usually The Blob, Attack of the Giant Crab Monsters, Creature of the Black Lagoon, so I used to go there a lot and I saw all of those films as a kid, and I really loved it.

When I left Ohio when I was 17 and ended up in New York and realised that not all films had the giant crab monsters in them, it really opened up a lot of things for me. I've always loved films, always. I studied literature and I went to Columbia in New York and I went to Paris for part of one year and ended up staying there. I didn't go to classes there, but ended up at the Cinemathèque, and there it opened up even wider because there I saw a variety of films from all over the world.

I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema. I was writing prose poems, but they were starting to echo not film scripts, but descriptions of scenes in a cinematic way. Then I didn't have any money and I didn't know what to do with myself, and I applied to graduate film school at NYU. I'd never made a film, but submitted some writing and I guess to fill in their group of students with some potential writers, I go "financial assistance" and I was accepted there and really it was just a whim that I applied and then studied there for two years. I didn't get my degree there; I got it later, they gave me an honourary one.

I didn't get the degree because in my last year, for my thesis film I made a feature called Permanent Vacation and they'd given me a scholarship, the Louis B Mayer fellowship and they made a mistake. Instead of sending it to the school for tuition, they sent it directly to me, so I spent it on the budget of the film. The film school did not like the film, nor did they like the fact that I hadn't paid tuition and used the money for the film and I didn't get a degree, but later they started using my name in ads for the school and I said in an interview, "That's odd, cause they didn't like my film and they didn't give me a degree." And then they sent me a degree. (Laughter) And with that degree and a $1.50, you can buy a coffee in New York.

GA: Permanent Vacation was made for $12,000 and then you made Stranger Than Paradise, which originally was a half-hour short. How much did that cost?

JJ: About $7,000, something like that.

GA: And it got a very enthusiastic reception.

JJ: What I did was I completed the half-hour film, but before really showing it, I wrote two more sections for a potential feature film which I didn't think would really happen, but at least I had it in case. I was very lucky and eventually showed the film, got some good responses, and some people helped to make the longer version of the film.

Wim Wenders gave me some unexposed film material that was left over from - that was actually for the half-hour version - The State of Things - and in the longer version the black sections in-between had to be a certain type of exposed negative to get a true black, and I got a roll of black negative film from Jean-Marie Straub, so I had some help from some pretty amazing people. I don't know why they helped me but (Laughter)

GA: It is entirely made up of discreet shots - every scene consists of one shot interrupted by black film - which is quite a formal or experimental way of telling the story. Why did you decide to do it and what is your interest in those formal things?

JJ: I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it. I was interested formally from literature and musical structures. I don't remember exactly where it came from. At that time, I was also inspired by very formally pure films, films by Carl Dreyer or Bresson.

Those things were very moving to me, especially at a time when MTV was just starting, and there was this barrage of images that was not so interesting to me at the time. It seemed like film-making was starting to imitate advertising. It was something that wasn't my aesthetic at the time. It came from those things.

GA: The film has certainly got a serious side to it, but it is also very full of humour and that's something that's coursed through all of your work. Why is an element of comedy so important to you in your movies?

JJ: Laughter is good for your spirit and Oscar Wilde said: "Life is far too important to be taken seriously," which is a quote I really love and I feel that way about the work as well. In Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, there's a quote from Agakurai, a Japanese text, written by an old Samurai, and one of them has to do with how things of great concern should be treated lightly, and things of small concern should be [treated] seriously. That kind of contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.

GA: With Strangers in Paradise and Down By Law, you cast John Lurie and you were quite involved in the music scene before you started making films?

JJ: It was a really interesting time in New York in the late 70s and early 80s, and the music scene was really, really interesting because you didn't have to be a virtuoso to make music, it was more about your desire to express things. That period was really, really important, because there were a lot of different artists - musicians, film-makers - that had this "make-it-in-the-garage" aesthetic that was really inspiring and really good. It was not about trying to be famous or have a career, or be a virtuoso, or be flashy. It was more like having real emotional feelings that you expressed through whatever form, mostly by picking up guitars you didn't really know how to play and bashing away on them.

That gave way to a lot of interesting things. I always think the Sex Pistols and the Ramones as very, very important because they stripped things down. Dogme 95 owes some debt to the purity of so-called punk rock. But I also love The Clash because they were the opposite, they were into synthesis in that they said: "Bring us reggae, rockabilly, R&B, we'll take all that and charge it up with our feelings." Two opposite aesthetics which appealed to me and inspired me. Still do.

GA: You talk about these musicians making music in an emotionally expressive way, but when Strangers in Paradise came out some people didn't quite understand your attitude towards the John Lurie character, who is anything but emotionally expressive; he's very concerned about his own self-image. And also in Down By Law so is Tom Waits. You do seem to have this interest in puncturing their self-image and pretensions to coolness and showing that much more innocent, straightforward people can transform those people. Would you say that's a valid interpretation of those films, and if so what is your interest in that?

JJ: In what? Sorry, I drifted off. (Laughter) To me, John Lurie's character is not non-emotional. He tries to be not emotional, he tries to be cool, but it's transparent. I have to tell everyone that when I finish a film and it goes out and is released, I never look at my films again. I don't like looking back. I don't even like talking about 'em! (Laughter) So I'm really digging back in my memory because I don't like to sit and look at my films again.

But my recollection is that the character of John Lurie is made very human by the fact that he cannot disguise his emotions, and when Eva leaves, he's upset even though he treated her badly. But he didn't want her to leave and that's a contradiction that's very human and flawed, but transparent. I don't think he's able to hide his emotions. Does that have anything to do with the question? (Laughter)

GA: Absolutely. I think it confirms what I said.

JJ: Let's talk about baseball.

GA: I don't know anything about baseball.

JJ: Baseball is one of the most beautiful games. (Laughter) It is. It is a very Zen-like game. I don't like American football. I think it's boring and ridiculous and predictable. But baseball is very beautiful. It's played on a diamond. (Laughter)

GA: I've seen a few movies about it.

JJ: Cricket makes no sense to me. (Laughter) I find it beautiful to watch and I like that they break for tea. (Laughter) That is very cool, but I don't understand. My friends from The Clash tried to explain it years and years ago, but I didn't understand what they were talking about.

GA: From sports to William Blake and Robert Frost, because in Down By Law, you have the Roberto Benigni character frequently quoting from Frost, and in Dead Man, you have references to William Blake. What is your interest in poetry, because it's not very often that we see characters in movies quoting and referring to poetry?

JJ: Yeah, if you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. (Laughter) But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry. I think that Dante was hip-hop culture because he wrote in vernacular Italian, and at the time that was unheard of; people wrote in Latin or Petrach wrote in high Italian, and so Dante was talking street stuff. And so poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.

Language can be abstracted, language can be used as a very beautiful code in poetry, the nuances and the multiple meanings of things, it has a music to it. It has so many things in it. It is also reduced from prose and therefore can be both mathematical, or very, very abstract. A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published. For the rest of his life, he published everything himself and no one had any real interest in it during his lifetime, which is true of many, many poets, so I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way. I don't know. I like poetry. Dammit, I like poetry; anyone got a problem with that?! (Laughter)

GA: Going on to Coffee and Cigarettes. You've made five little shorts revolving around this theme of people meeting up in cafes and sharing coffee and experiences.

JJ: Don't talk about my shorts! (Laughter)

GA: You were talking about doing enough so you could eventually put them together to make a feature. Do you still have plans to do that?

JJ: Yeah, I do. In fact, I have plans to shoot some more this coming year. But it's a project that I'm not in any rush to complete. I'm behind my schedule because I wanted to shoot one or two each year, but I haven't shot any for four years now. The intention was to shoot short films that can exist as shorts independently, but when I put them all together, there are things that echo through them like the dialogue repeats; the situation is always the same, the way they're shot is very simple and the same - I have a master shot, if there's two characters, a two shot, singles on each, and an over-the-table overhead shot which I can use to edit their dialogue.

So they're very simple and because the design of how they're shot is worked out already, it gives complete freedom to play; they're like cartoons almost to me. And it's a relief from making a feature film where everything has to be more carefully mapped out. So I like doing them and they're ridiculous and the actors can improvise a lot, and they don't have to be really realistic characters that hit a very specific tone as in a feature film. They're really fun, I want to make more of them definitely. Sometime I will release them all together, but I don't know when.

GA: You do seem to have written roles with specific actors in mind and you trade off their personalities a little bit in the film. How do you decide to work with a certain person and do you consult with them about their dialogue?

JJ: I started working with friends of mine and that, to some degree, continues. I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are. I start with actors that I know personally or I know their work, and there are things about their work or their presence or their own personality that make a character, that exaggerates some qualities and suppresses other qualities. It's always a real collaboration for me.

What I like to do also is to rehearse with the actors scenes that are not in the script and will not be in the film because what we're really doing is trying to establish their character, and good acting to me is about reacting. I'm not a big fan of the theatre because, often, I know what their intention is. They know what the intention of the scene is and they're following a line to achieve that intention, but that's acting, and in real life, if you're at a table with four people, you don't know which one is going to speak next, it's not scripted in that way, so if you can work with the actor to get to a place where they are confident in their character, then you let their character react to the scene that you're filming.

All actors are different. Nicholas Ray said to me: "There is no one way to work with all actors and anyone who tells you that is full of shit" - in his words, 'cause I don't talk like that myself. (Laughter) So what you do is work with each actor individually to find out "How can I work with this person, how can the two of us collaborate?" and it's always that there's a different way. Different actors have different strengths. Some are really brilliant at improvising, others want the dialogue set for them, they want a map.

I love rehearsing because in rehearsals there are no mistakes, nothing is wrong, some things apply or lead you to focus on the character and the things that don't apply are equally valuable because they lead you to towards what does. I'm not a director who says, "Say your line, hit your mark", that's not my style. I want them to work with me and everyone I choose to collaborate with elevates our work above what I could imagine on my own. Hopefully, if not it's not working right. I'm like a navigator and I try to encourage our collaboration and find the best way that will produce fruit. I like fruit. (Laughter) I like cherries, I like bananas. (Laughter) Poor Geoff Andrew didn't know what he was getting himself into. (Laughter)